Prohibitions on vote-selling made more sense in eras when factory owners ran for office and basically pressured their workers to vote for them by paying them a pittance for their vote. It was already illegal to threaten someone into voting for you, so they engaged in this sort of vote-buying to cover it up. That's basically why many of these laws exist, though fully anonymous voting would render the point sort of moot. Of course, if people are given a slip of paper that states how they voted, it becomes un-moot again.
The second reason they exist is that in any healthy democracy there would obviously be no vote-selling or -buying, and these laws serve to keep up appearances by treating the symptom, not the cause.
My parents have been using Ubuntu for a few months now, and they've never had to use the command line. For the things the average person does on a computer, Linux is very usable, and has been for years now.
This is the CO2 legislation. It is a much bigger deal than legislation concerning NOx, CFCs or even CO emissions.
Perhaps, but its controversialness has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that it's what animals exhale, as your original post suggested. Don't blame other people for missing your point if you apparently misrepresent it yourself.
I'm getting really sick of people trying to justify the excesses of this administration by pointing out it's just more of the same. Yes, corruption has always been around, and the difference between this administration and pretty much any random previous one is one of scale, not kind, but that doesn't mean the Bush administration hasn't been particularly egregious, or undeniably worse than any other in recent history.
Why try to explain away their excesses like this? Is it just an attempt to justify not getting up and doing something about it?
At least if you crash into something you're pretty much guaranteed to have all cameras on you, thereby giving the your advertisers more screen time. It balances out.
I'm for this 42 day thing myself. Its not as if its a breach of human rights or anything, I mean, we aren't waterboarding them, or locking them away for years without trial....
You're for it because it could be worse? That's the totality of your argument? How about being against it because holding someone without charge is unjust (and it is a breach of human rights, actually), and because there really are no valid arguments in favor of this bill?
The fact that other countries do worse things to their prisoners does not justify this sort of legislation.
And before you say that this is also true of some superstitions, those that do have a ritual element are usually hang-overs from pagan religions (e.g. touching wood invokes Odin's protection, throwing salt over one's shoulder and carrying brides into their new home were Roman religious practices).
If you're going to define things like that there is no superstition at all, and your definition won't be shared by the rest of the world. Regardless of whether or not those things are associated with religions, they are superstitious, just as prayer is.
Superstition is all about pattern matching going awry, whether it involves inevitable bad (or good) luck or rituals to change said luck.
Buddhism is a major modern religion of great antiquity which says it's wrong to kill unbelievers too, and makes no active attempt to convert others.
Spreading the teaching of the Buddha has always been an integral part of Buddhism, and regarding the killing of unbelievers, without even getting into the issue of the Sohei and orders like the Shaolin, whether or not a religion supports killing unbelievers isn't as important to its survival as that it prohibits killing believers, in most circumstances.
Religion survives for two reasons:
1) Followers _believe_ that it is beneficial to them (whether it's actually beneficial is irrelevant).
2) It provides a common societal framework that allows people from one community to integrate with other communities that follow the same religion.
That's basically what I said, though the latter can be disputed.
Sure, it's possible - even likely given sufficient time - that bacteria will evolve resistance to our current antibiotics.
They already are. A ban on anti-bacterial soap (which has no practical benefit for home use) would slow the development of further resistance down by making it less likely certain mutations will be fixed. This will enable us to keep using current antibiotics for a few decades longer. It's not about putting the cat back in the bag, it's about closing the gate before the remainder of our cows runs away.
Human beings aren't helpless, but we sure as fuck aren't going to win an evolutionary arms race against bacteria if idiots like you get away with imposing an arbitrary handicap on us for no reason other than that you want to complain about something you know nothing about.
All those problems can be solved with religion. Religion is a tool to create order, to make people work together and to keep large groups of people from fighting each other for resources. Every single religion (at least the successful ones) made it an important point that God (or whoever) doesn't like it when you kill your fellow man or steal from him. And since they had no surveillance cams back then, God was usually allmighty, omnipresent and omniscient, so you could rest assured that you'll get your punishment, if not in life then in death.
You have cause and effect backwards.
Early religion arose by necessity, as a way of explaining what was at the time beyond people's ability to explain and as a side-effect of our pattern-seeking abilities misfiring. See also: the development of common superstitions (some very interesting experiments have been done on "lower" animals in that regard, like Skinner's pigeons). Early religions are basically just collections of superstitions and just-so stories about things like thunder and sunrise.
The major modern religions are religions that have survived for thousands of years, and the reason they survived for that long is because they developed traits that ensured they would be passed on and expand, like prohibitions against killing fellow believers (but not, generally, unbelievers) and injunctions to go out and convert people. These aren't inherent traits of religion, they're inherent traits of long-lived religions, which is a very small minority of all religions in the history of mankind. They essentially co-opted preexisting social structure (like morality, which ironically many believers today believe to be solely the purview of religion) for their own survival. It's simple memetic evolution.
Religion didn't survive because it's good for humanity, or even because it's good for individual believers; it survived because it's good at surviving. It exists for its own sake, and anything else is just a side-effect.
. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'
Using a very narrow definition of life and then acting surprised when it probably couldn't arise in vastly different circumstances is disingenuous. Not to mention that it ignores the fact that nearly every part of our universe is incredibly hostile to life as we know it anyway.
We're barely clinging to existence on the congealed surface of a ball of molten rock at the bottom of a gravity well in some tiny, god-forsaken corner of a massive, uncaring universe, pretending that that universe is in fact the best it could possibly be and made especially for us. It takes profound ignorance or cynical disingenuousness to defend the fine-tuned universe argument.
Hitler's Holocaust had more to do with animal husbandry (which predates Darwin by millenia) than with the scientific theory of evolution.
Even if you could demonstrate a direct causal link between evolutionary biology and mass murder, though, the fact remains that evolutionary theory is true while things like Christian Science are not, and a billion social Darwinists buying into the naturalistic fallacy wouldn't change that.
Though even if argumentum ad consequentiam weren't a logical fallacy, you'd still be wrong. Considering how much of modern medicine and agriculture, for instance, is based on evolutionary theory, it's safe to say Darwin has saved a lot more lives than Hitler ever could have snuffed out.
Except completely non-sequitur. I can see no way how being a Chinese American would adversely affect their Scouting experience, unless there was some kind of xenophobia in their troop.
You blithely accuse all kids of homophobia and say they're cruel enough to pick on you just for being a nerd on the one hand, but then want to pretend they wouldn't pick on kids for not being white on the other?
You aren't just a bigot, you're a disingenuous one.
The vast majority of games that are released here (in Belgium) aren't translated. Occasionally the manual might get translated, but even that's happening less and less. Whatever the reason for the delayed releases and higher prices, it's not localisation. (I would guess prices are higher simply because they can get away with it, given the higher average income of their target audience in much of Europe compared to the US.)
ISPs are a natural monopoly, so your options are basically government regulation, a government-run monopoly, or the situation you currently have in the US. And modern socialism works a lot better than you might think. Just look at Europe.
Leftism is bad because it takes from those who earned and gives to those who don't deserve.
Thank you for demonstrating once more that libertarianism is about childish selfishness at its base. What magical fairy land do you live in where everyone is born with the exact same opportunities? Protip: we are a society, and without that society those who "earned" would have nothing. A society doesn't survive by kicking the less fortunate in the nuts. For every greedy welfare moocher (which I'm guessing you imagine make up the majority of the people on welfare) out there there are a hundred families who have fallen on hard times because the parents' employers care more about profit than about people.
Government exists to serve and protect the people. All of them. I suggest you get over yourself and get used to it.
This is why you RTFA instead of relying on the summary. He does understand why they accept it, and the conclusion he reaches is that they're secure enough for most purposes.
Or better yet, what would happen if some new device could record without observing?
I spend most of my time debating creationists, not laypersons who misunderstand quantum physics, but I bet physicists get as tired of shouting "IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT" at people like you as I do at creationists.
It's probably pretty accurate though, but is it accurate to trust?
You'll remember Feynman once compared our understanding of quantum physics to measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within the width of a human hair. I'd say anything with that kind of predictive power is probably accurate enough to trust your life with.
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Prohibitions on vote-selling made more sense in eras when factory owners ran for office and basically pressured their workers to vote for them by paying them a pittance for their vote. It was already illegal to threaten someone into voting for you, so they engaged in this sort of vote-buying to cover it up.
That's basically why many of these laws exist, though fully anonymous voting would render the point sort of moot. Of course, if people are given a slip of paper that states how they voted, it becomes un-moot again.
The second reason they exist is that in any healthy democracy there would obviously be no vote-selling or -buying, and these laws serve to keep up appearances by treating the symptom, not the cause.
Depending on the context it's either the GNU C Compiler or the GNU Compiler Collection. And GNU, of course, stands for GNU's Not Unix.
I think you mean:
Yeah, not always a good idea.
Only in TeX. In writing that isn't first compiled, - is taken to mean an en dash, and -- an em dash.
My parents have been using Ubuntu for a few months now, and they've never had to use the command line. For the things the average person does on a computer, Linux is very usable, and has been for years now.
Perhaps, but its controversialness has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that it's what animals exhale, as your original post suggested.
Don't blame other people for missing your point if you apparently misrepresent it yourself.
I'm getting really sick of people trying to justify the excesses of this administration by pointing out it's just more of the same.
Yes, corruption has always been around, and the difference between this administration and pretty much any random previous one is one of scale, not kind, but that doesn't mean the Bush administration hasn't been particularly egregious, or undeniably worse than any other in recent history.
Why try to explain away their excesses like this? Is it just an attempt to justify not getting up and doing something about it?
``Republican'' is synonymous with ``American'' now? Who are you, Joe McCarthy?
This may surprise you, but kdawson's real name is in fact Keith Dawson.
Who'd have guessed?
At least if you crash into something you're pretty much guaranteed to have all cameras on you, thereby giving the your advertisers more screen time. It balances out.
You're for it because it could be worse? That's the totality of your argument?
How about being against it because holding someone without charge is unjust (and it is a breach of human rights, actually), and because there really are no valid arguments in favor of this bill?
The fact that other countries do worse things to their prisoners does not justify this sort of legislation.
If you're going to define things like that there is no superstition at all, and your definition won't be shared by the rest of the world.
Regardless of whether or not those things are associated with religions, they are superstitious, just as prayer is.
Superstition is all about pattern matching going awry, whether it involves inevitable bad (or good) luck or rituals to change said luck.
Spreading the teaching of the Buddha has always been an integral part of Buddhism, and regarding the killing of unbelievers, without even getting into the issue of the Sohei and orders like the Shaolin, whether or not a religion supports killing unbelievers isn't as important to its survival as that it prohibits killing believers, in most circumstances.
That's basically what I said, though the latter can be disputed.Memetic evolution isn't a new or controversial topic. Look into it, it's interesting.
They already are. A ban on anti-bacterial soap (which has no practical benefit for home use) would slow the development of further resistance down by making it less likely certain mutations will be fixed. This will enable us to keep using current antibiotics for a few decades longer.
It's not about putting the cat back in the bag, it's about closing the gate before the remainder of our cows runs away.
Human beings aren't helpless, but we sure as fuck aren't going to win an evolutionary arms race against bacteria if idiots like you get away with imposing an arbitrary handicap on us for no reason other than that you want to complain about something you know nothing about.
You have cause and effect backwards.
Early religion arose by necessity, as a way of explaining what was at the time beyond people's ability to explain and as a side-effect of our pattern-seeking abilities misfiring. See also: the development of common superstitions (some very interesting experiments have been done on "lower" animals in that regard, like Skinner's pigeons). Early religions are basically just collections of superstitions and just-so stories about things like thunder and sunrise.
The major modern religions are religions that have survived for thousands of years, and the reason they survived for that long is because they developed traits that ensured they would be passed on and expand, like prohibitions against killing fellow believers (but not, generally, unbelievers) and injunctions to go out and convert people. These aren't inherent traits of religion, they're inherent traits of long-lived religions, which is a very small minority of all religions in the history of mankind.
They essentially co-opted preexisting social structure (like morality, which ironically many believers today believe to be solely the purview of religion) for their own survival. It's simple memetic evolution.
Religion didn't survive because it's good for humanity, or even because it's good for individual believers; it survived because it's good at surviving. It exists for its own sake, and anything else is just a side-effect.
Like Douglas Adams once said:
Using a very narrow definition of life and then acting surprised when it probably couldn't arise in vastly different circumstances is disingenuous. Not to mention that it ignores the fact that nearly every part of our universe is incredibly hostile to life as we know it anyway.
We're barely clinging to existence on the congealed surface of a ball of molten rock at the bottom of a gravity well in some tiny, god-forsaken corner of a massive, uncaring universe, pretending that that universe is in fact the best it could possibly be and made especially for us. It takes profound ignorance or cynical disingenuousness to defend the fine-tuned universe argument.
Hitler's Holocaust had more to do with animal husbandry (which predates Darwin by millenia) than with the scientific theory of evolution.
Even if you could demonstrate a direct causal link between evolutionary biology and mass murder, though, the fact remains that evolutionary theory is true while things like Christian Science are not, and a billion social Darwinists buying into the naturalistic fallacy wouldn't change that.
Though even if argumentum ad consequentiam weren't a logical fallacy, you'd still be wrong. Considering how much of modern medicine and agriculture, for instance, is based on evolutionary theory, it's safe to say Darwin has saved a lot more lives than Hitler ever could have snuffed out.
You blithely accuse all kids of homophobia and say they're cruel enough to pick on you just for being a nerd on the one hand, but then want to pretend they wouldn't pick on kids for not being white on the other?
You aren't just a bigot, you're a disingenuous one.
The vast majority of games that are released here (in Belgium) aren't translated. Occasionally the manual might get translated, but even that's happening less and less.
Whatever the reason for the delayed releases and higher prices, it's not localisation. (I would guess prices are higher simply because they can get away with it, given the higher average income of their target audience in much of Europe compared to the US.)
Communism, classical socialism, and modern socialism (social democracy) are all different things.
ISPs are a natural monopoly, so your options are basically government regulation, a government-run monopoly, or the situation you currently have in the US.
And modern socialism works a lot better than you might think. Just look at Europe.
I don't think Chelsea is even running.
Thank you for demonstrating once more that libertarianism is about childish selfishness at its base. What magical fairy land do you live in where everyone is born with the exact same opportunities?
Protip: we are a society, and without that society those who "earned" would have nothing. A society doesn't survive by kicking the less fortunate in the nuts. For every greedy welfare moocher (which I'm guessing you imagine make up the majority of the people on welfare) out there there are a hundred families who have fallen on hard times because the parents' employers care more about profit than about people.
Government exists to serve and protect the people. All of them. I suggest you get over yourself and get used to it.
This is why you RTFA instead of relying on the summary. He does understand why they accept it, and the conclusion he reaches is that they're secure enough for most purposes.
I spend most of my time debating creationists, not laypersons who misunderstand quantum physics, but I bet physicists get as tired of shouting "IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT" at people like you as I do at creationists.
You'll remember Feynman once compared our understanding of quantum physics to measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within the width of a human hair. I'd say anything with that kind of predictive power is probably accurate enough to trust your life with.